The game is easier than it has ever been. What I think a lot of you have been neglecting is the fact that in addition to boss mechanics being (generally) simpler in Vanilla/TBC the classes themselves were far less mechanically capable. In Vanilla simple mechanics like raid-wide damage were difficult to deal with, and a boss like Ra-den would be utterly impossible because tanks barely had any forms of damage mitigation.

Now, with all the guides, easy gear upgrades, etc. it would stand to reason that classic Naxxramas and Sunwell pre-nerf were harder than nearly any raid since.

The game is easier than it has ever been. What I think a lot of you have been neglecting is the fact that in addition to boss mechanics being (generally) simpler in Vanilla/TBC the classes themselves were far less mechanically capable. In Vanilla simple mechanics like raid-wide damage were difficult to deal with, and a boss like Ra-den would be utterly impossible because tanks barely had any forms of damage mitigation.

Now, with all the guides, easy gear upgrades, etc. it would stand to reason that classic Naxxramas and Sunwell pre-nerf were harder than nearly any raid since.

Yeah, they weren't hard, just poorly designed. You could do the same today by having taunts miss 10% of the time, needing to stack 1/3rd of your raid with the same class/spec, and requiring months of gear farming to overcome the bosses mathematically rather than mechanically. Oh yeah, better stand in the same spot the whole fight and watch out of that one mechanic that you need to pay attention to (assuming you even needed to do that), while performing your rotation so simplistic that you could macro it all to one button, which is assuming you even needed to do that. I still remember seeing warlocks outperforming everyone in the raid, who wasn't a rogue with legendaries, with a damage breakdown of 100% shadowbolt...

I agree there is an ability bloat and complexity level that is getting higher and higher and becoming more exhausting to deal with. While I do not find raiding stressful, I am certainly more tired after a raid than I was in WotLK or such, and it is becoming more of a task each new tier to learn fights and keep up with everything. Hell, just going over the first 8 SoO bosses and reading/watching videos on all felt like I was doing a project for my university, very happy I am not a raid leader anymore.

I understand the issue though, raiders keep getting better. We won't get worse. How else to make it harder? Add more stuff to deal with. Hopefully Blizzard acknowledges this and we reach a peak sometime, and they find other ways to increase difficulty. I think Elegon was a very good example of having a strong DPS and Healer check when you first fought him in 463-489 gear, but he did have a lot to deal with still.

Yeah, they weren't hard, just poorly designed. You could do the same today by having taunts miss 10% of the time, needing to stack 1/3rd of your raid with the same class/spec, and requiring months of gear farming to overcome the bosses mathematically rather than mechanically. Oh yeah, better stand in the same spot the whole fight and watch out of that one mechanic that you need to pay attention to (assuming you even needed to do that), while performing your rotation so simplistic that you could macro it all to one button, which is assuming you even needed to do that. I still remember seeing warlocks outperforming everyone in the raid, who wasn't a rogue with legendaries, with a damage breakdown of 100% shadowbolt...

I simply said WoW hasn't added anything that increased upon the skillset required by gamers in general. As far as keyboard turning goes, it was as silly back in the late 90s as it is today. Keyboard turners were as easy to spot in Classic as they were in Quake and Counter-Strike. Even my semi-hardcore guild forced people to use a mouse, or we'd drop them.

As far as focus on the screen goes, most bullet hell games (they were popular back in the 80s and 90s) had plenty of things to focus on on the screen. They required you to think multiple steps ahead of time to maximize not only your damage avoidance, but also your damage output. They generally also required you to completely learn the 'encounters' you were up against to win.

As far as teamplay goes, you needed more team coordination in games such as Quake and Counter-Strike than you do in World of Warcraft. You may have more players in a raiding group, but your opponents were much more dynamic in the two shooters. Both games also forced very high situational awareness, reaction times and split second decision making upon you. Quake in particular required you to be very good at avoiding fast paced projectiles from multiple sources at once.

Gaming honestly hasn't changed that much in the past 20 years. The graphics may be better, but as a 40 year old gamer, the set of skills I picked up in the 80s and 90s continues to serve me very well even today. I haven't had to learn anything new since I was a teenager, as all I ever have to do is adapt my old-timer knowledge to new scenarios.

Quake and the like are more comparable to pvp in WoW than the pve side of things... and while those games certainly require more mouse precision, and player movement is probably more important, there's also far fewer variables to take into account, because at best, everyone has a rather limited capacity arsenal. It's really a different thing entirely.

I dunno, you and I are about the same age, and I think that WoW requires a good deal more 'multitasking' than most arcade games from back then, even if it's at the cost of less sheer reaction time capability or precision. Maybe I'm just getting old :P

On a side note, as a kid I always used to be in awe of people that could play Defender or Stargate REALLY well. One of the few arcade games that had a lot of variables going on at once, and precise movement wasn't the easiest thing to pick up.

thing is, ppl are comparing vanilla and bc raiding to MoP raiding with current class abilities which is a rather stupid thing to do as those things cant be compared as the classes where in 2 entirely different places ability-wise. What ppl need to do is compare vanilla and bc raiding and the abilities they had back then to the MoP raiding(the HP bloat as well for that matter) and abilities they have now and if you do that and then factor in the fact that those fights were only "normal" versions, then it becomes a rather different discussion.

Definitely think raiding has gotten more complex as time goes by, but a fight like Brutallus was strictly a gear check, it's silly to compare it to other fights. Hell, compare something like Shade of Aran to Garrosh Hellscream, the amount of mechanics are pretty much the same lol. Plus Aran had ring of fire, in which you couldn't move, at least with something like that you had some personal responsibility in the fight. You don't see much stuff like that now if you aren't a tank, or aren't doing hard modes.

I woudn't say that a fight like Kil'Jaeden (honestly I would say it was quite abit harder but ya NM's) is that different from a fight like Garrosh nm in terms of how much is going.
Maybe I remember Kil'jaeden pre 3.0 harder then he really was but ya.

This is the party(GoP) whose frontrunners are being wiped out by an overly aggressive meme generator with a cheese puff on its head by their own supporters. I wouldn't credit them with the intelligence or foresight not to burn toast, much less have a long term strategy underway.

The fights aren't harder...there are just WAY more things to know about a fight.
All fight mechanics are planned, and can be dealt with in predictable manners.
That being said, the amount of knowledge a raider has to know for each boss is honestly getting a little out of hand.
There are so many mechanics for each fight, that, in order to know every aspect of the fight requires a lot of studying.
Look at some of the fights in the dungeon journal....there are some that are ~10 pages long!

Quake and the like are more comparable to pvp in WoW than the pve side of things... and while those games certainly require more mouse precision, and player movement is probably more important, there's also far fewer variables to take into account, because at best, everyone has a rather limited capacity arsenal. It's really a different thing entirely.

I think this might show a bit of a lack of understanding of just how a typical team match plays out in a game like Quake. You could take 20 practice games against the exact same team and none of the games would be close to similar. You could also take 20 games against a team and every match would be almost identical. It all depends on the team you go up against, as well as any disparity in skill level. Generally speaking, no two games are the same, and most vary by quite a bit.

Of course it is all very subjective, but I honestly can't agree with you that a typical raid encounter varies more from try to try than a typical team match in Quake. I'm not saying raid encounters are easy, I'm simply disagreeing with the proposition that a typical raid encounter has more variables to it than a typical 4v4 match in a fast paced FPS like Quake. A typical raid encounter in WoW never does something I don't expect, while a good opponent in Quake will always keep me guessing.

Originally Posted by melodramocracy

I dunno, you and I are about the same age, and I think that WoW requires a good deal more 'multitasking' than most arcade games from back then, even if it's at the cost of less sheer reaction time capability or precision. Maybe I'm just getting old :P

No, you're right in that raiding requires more multi-tasking from the player than your typical arcade game. Yet there were plenty of video games much older than WoW that required the player to multi-task. I suppose most people learn to multi-task outside of video gaming, to be honest. Just playing a game of soccer requires you to keep close attention to your opponent, to the ball, to your own team mates as well as many other things. The same goes for many other sports. You would certainly be very hard pressed to convince me that gamers today are somehow better at multi-tasking than gamers back in the mid 00s.

yes, encounters are more complex now but they are not harder. most of the fights now are just identifying what is the important thing in the fight that your raid will fail on, and then spending time figuring out how to counter that thing.

(Also I would compare a fight like Ambershaper in HoF, or Rag in FL to Lady Vashj and you know how many guilds failed on those.)

You can't make a boss as simple the bosses in Vanilla and expect it to satisfy players these day. Players has experience all kinds of mechanics. Things will need to be more and more complex to keep up with them.

Except that, you know, mechanically complex does equal hard. Especially when you have to coordinate the entire raid to shift and handle it as a group perfectly. Individual mechanics aren't hard, anyone can master a mechanic when they only need to worry about themselves. Having 20 people move into exact positions and rotating perfect interrupts within 15 second intervals while spreading and collapsing efficiently is hard. Running out of a pool to get dispelled so you don't wipe the raid and dodging orbs is not. It's embarrassing if you mess it up, but that doesn't make it difficult. This is why Jin'rokh is so easy, and no, it doesn't look hard on paper. It looks like a vanilla fight on paper.

That's on top of more complex dps rotations. Most mechanically complex fights have a built-in gear check themselves, the gear check being that if you can push certain dps thresholds then the mechanics become significantly easier or you don't have to deal with them. All rotations were a joke in vanilla/bc and to a point - in wrath.

Sure, there are fairly simple rotations still around, but they are the minority and rarely the optimal spec. There isn't a single spec left in the game where you can push only 2 buttons and do remotely competitive damage.

Sure, there are fairly simple rotations still around, but they are the minority and rarely the optimal spec. There isn't a single spec left in the game where you can push only 2 buttons and do remotely competitive damage.

Just out of curiosity, do you believe gamers back in the mid 00s would have a hard time picking up modern day rotations? I can only speak for myself when I say rotations became largely automatic to me almost instantly. Even on my guardian druid, who had more of a priority queue than a rotation. You're not the first person I've seen mention rotations in this context, yet I can't imagine the average gamer having a hard time becoming good at button rotations.

Bosses weren't as hard as they are now but on the other hand classes were very weak, much weaker from a defensive pov, e.g. rogues didn't have cos and feint didn't reduce aoe dmg, mages coul get ice block by going deep into frost tree, shield wall was very strong but had 30 min cd, palas sucked at everything but healing and dispelling, many bosses an trash were immune to some schools of magic (fire mage on ragnaros? gg) and many required a specific resistance gear on tanks (or all raid members) to avoid getting blown up, there was no mass ress and trash had shorter repop time, all of this made raiding not really more difficult, but it made it more tedious for sure.

With that said, it was impossible back in vanilla even for a hardcore guild to clear all the content in a couple of days.